2017 promises to be an interesting year for the storage industry. New technology is knocking at the door and present technology will not surrender without a fight. Not only new technology will influence the market but the storage market itself is morphing:

Further Storage consolidation

Let’s say that December 2015 was an appetizer with Netapp buying Solidfire. But in 2016 the storage market went through the first wave of consolidation: Docker storage start-up ClusterHQ shut its doors, Violin Memory filed for chapter 11, Nutanix bought PernixData , Nexgen was acquired by Pivot 3, Broadcom acquired Brocade, Samsung acquired Joyent. Lastly there was also the mega merger between storage mogul EMC and Dell. This consolidation trend will continue in 2017 as the environment for hyper-converged, flash and object storage startups is getting tougher because all the traditional vendors now offer their own flavor. As the hardware powering these solutions is commodity, the only differentiator is software.

Some interesting names to keep an eye on for M&A action or closure: Cloudian, Minio, Scality, Scale Computing, Stratoscale, Atlantis Computing, HyperGrid/Gridstore, Pure Storage, Tegile, Kaminario, Tintri, Nibmle Storage, Simplivity, Scale Computing, Primary Data, … We are pretty sure some of these name will not make it past 2017.

Open vStorage has already a couple of large projects lined up. 2017 sure looks promising for us.

The Hybrid cloud

Back from the dead like a phoenix. I expect a new live for the the hybrid cloud. Enterprises increasingly migrated to the public cloud in 2016 and this will only accelerate, both in speed and numbers. There are now 5 big clouds: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google and Oracle.
But connecting these public cloud with in-house datacenter assets will be key. The gap between public and private clouds has never been smaller. AWS and VMware, 2 front runners, are already offering products to migrate between both solutions. Network infrastructure (performance, latency) is now finally also capable of turning the hybrid cloud into reality. Numerous enterprises will realise that going to the public cloud isn’t the only option for future infrastructure. I believe migration of storage and workloads will be one of the hottest features of Open vStorage in 2017. Hand in hand with the migration of workloads we will see the birth of various new storage as a service providers offering S3, secondary but also primary storage out of the public cloud.

On a side note, HPE (Helion), Cisco (Intercloud) and telecom giant Verizon closed their public cloud in 2016. It will be good to keep an eye out on these players to see what they are up to in 2017.

The end of Hyper-Convergence hype

In the storage market prediction for 2015 I predicted the rise of hyper-convergence. Hyper-converged solutions have lived up to their expectations and have become a mature software solution. I believe 2017 will mark a turning point for the hyper-convergence hype. Let’s sum up some reasons for the end of the hype cycle:

The hyper-converged market is mature and the top use cases have been identified: SMB environments, VDI and Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO).

Private and public clouds are becoming more and more centralised and large scale. More enterprises will come to understand that the one-size-fits-all and everything-in-a-single-box approach of hyper-converged systems doesn’t scale to a datacenter level. This is typically an area where hyper-converged solutions reach their limits.

The IT world works like a pendulum. Hyper-convergence brought flash as cache into the server as the latency to fetch data over the network was too high. With RDMA and round trip times of 10 usec and below, the latency of the network is no longer the bottleneck. The pendulum is now changing its direction as the so web-scalers, the companies on which the hyper-convergence hype is ented, want to disaggregate storage by moving flash out of each individual server into more flexible, centralized repositories.

Flash, Flash, Flash, everything is becoming flash. As stated earlier, the local flash device was used to accelerate slow SATA drives. With all-flash versions, these hyper-converged solutions go head to head with all-flash arrays.

One of the leaders of the hyper-converged pack has already started to move into the converged infrastructure direction by releasing a storage only appliance. It will be interesting to see who else follows.

With the new Fargo architecture which is designed for large scale, multi petabyte, multi datacenter environments, we already capture the next trend: meshed, hyper-aggregated architectures. The Fargo release supports RDMA, allows to built all-flash storage pools and incorporates a distributed cache across all flash in the datacenter. 100% future proof and ready to kickstart 2017.

PS. If you want to run Open vStorage hyper-converged, feel free to do so. We have componetized Open vStorage so you can optimize it for your use case: run everything in a single box or spread the components across different servers or even datacenters!

IoT storage lakes

More and more devices are connected to the internet. This Internet of Things (IoT) is posed to generate a tremendous amount of data. Not convinced? Intel research for example estimated that autonomous cars will produce 4 terabytes of data daily per car. These Big Data lakes need a new type of storage: storage which is ultra-scalable. Traditional storage is simply not suited to process this amount of storage. On top in 2017 we will see artificial intelligence increasingly being used to mine data in these lakes. This means the performance of the storage needs to able to serve real-time analytics. Since IoT device can be located anywhere in the world, geo-redundancy and geo-distribution are also required. Basically IoT use cases are a perfect match for the Open vStorage technology.